Welcome to everyone to this exciting Marconi Society event.
I hope you are as enthusiastic about this event as I am.
This truly is an opportunity to hear from titans of industry, the people
who have created much of what we live and depend on today for our activities.
It's an interesting period that they will be talking about the early 1970s, 50 years
ago were a period of rate invention and the creation the, of, at a very fundamental level,
the elements that we depend on completely.
In the case of Federico Faggin, the invention of the microprocessor.
In the case of chronologically, Marty Cooper, the.
First, a cell phone call with a handheld device, and in the case of vint Cerf, the
essence of the Internet itself, TCPIP.
So this will be an amazing session, hearing from these individuals, and I'm
very much looking forward to it myself.
This is an event that was initially billed as a members only event.
And as
we pondered that, we decided that this was too good to, to hold in the
Marconi Society itself and instead we make this available to a much, much larger
audience as an example of the benefits of being a part of the Marconi Society.
So hopefully you will take that into account as you move forward.
And I know that you didn't come to this event to see me, or Barry in front of me, so let's
move to those that you really did come to see, and I'd like to introduce our Master of
Ceremonies for this event, Yasaman, and she is herself a very accomplished individual.
She is a marconi Society Young Scholar.
And currently serves as an assistant professor of electrical and computer
engineering at Princeton university, which is, as most of one of the outstanding
academic institutions in the United States.
Again, to keep things brief, the KISS principle applies, and Yasaman, please take it away.
Thanks so much, Dennis.
And hello, everyone.
Welcome.
I'm super excited, honored to moderate this panel.
Let me go ahead and share a few slides, pick things up.
Hello, everyone.
Okay, so today we're going to have three pioneers, legends, my own role models and
this is my absolute, let me, all right, can you see the slides, and slide B?
Okay let me quickly talk about the agenda for today First, we're going to have three
short remarks by our three panelists.
Then we will open it up for questions, panel discussions, and
also questions from the audience.
So please keep your questions coming, leave them in the chat.
We'll read it.
And so that is questions we wanna ask given our short time.
So I thought a lot about how I'm gonna, I'm gonna do justice introducing our
pioneers in short three, four minutes.
And instead I thought you probably know everyone and you Googled and you did your homework.
And instead I'm gonna just share a few pictures with you that I really, blah.
Starting with Federico Faggin.
As you all know Federico was one of the inventors of MOS Silicon
Gate technology back in 1968.
This is the building block of our IC and then the MOS transistors that we see
today in every single device from memory to complex logic circuits and systems.
In 1971, 52 years ago Federico developed the first commercial microprocessor of Intel
4004, and then after 8008, and then 8080.
So I remember working with the 8080 back at my undergrad, but I don't remember
the versions before me, before that.
So you can see a picture of this Intel 4004 and on the top right of the slide.
And this was originally used in a calculating machine that you can see right next to it.
It's, it was interesting to learn that this initial CPU was a 4 bit
CPU with only 750 kHz of clock rate.
Very different from what we know as a modern CPU processors today.
And I think for Federico here is holding the layout of the chip, so correct me if
I'm wrong, but I think this is the layout of the chip that he is holding here.
Next panelist is Vint Cerf.
So Vint, as you know, he is the pioneer of internet.
He, with Bob Kahn developed the first TCP/IP protocol.
They wrote the first document back in 1973 and published it in I I
triple transaction on communications.
I went back and read that document.
Actually I was surprised that.
It was quite interesting and easy to read very much similar to what we know
of TCP/IP protocol that I teach my students in my introductory class today.
The sketch that you're seeing here is recreated from Vint's original sketch.
That he tried to simplify the problem, simplify this very complex problem by showing three
packet switch networks connected through multiple gateways and host computers, and trying
to come up with rules of how these networks should talk to each other and manage errors
that might happen during this connection.
I believe the picture on the right bottom is at around the same time,
1972-1973, when got his PhD at UCLA.
Last but definitely not least we have Martin Cooper on the call.
He's the inventor of the first portable cellphone in 1973.
I believe Marty has one of the one of the prototypes with him right now, and
it's very heavy, two and a half pounds.
It's very big, about 10 inches long.
He also made the first phone call from a Manhattan sidewalk, and a great test to see how
the signal quality is given a noisy background.
Great to have you all here with me today.
This is my absolute pleasure.
Without further ado, I'm going to turn it over to Federico to start his short remarks.
I'm pleased to be here to talk about a time of history when I was young.
In 1968, a computer, the smallest computers were called mini computers.
And they had a CPU that was made with the order of 50 to 100 integrated
circuits using bipolar technology.
And then they had core memories for the random access memory, and they could
hardly fit in a desk with a lot of memory.
So that technology was the best that could be done in those days.
There was a technology that was up and coming, it was MOS, but it had many problems.
And in 68, I was able to create a new technology that changed the way
that the MOS devices were built.
That brought five times the speed of the incumbent technology.
It was at that point you could have much lower leakage, which meant that
you could make Dynamic memories.
And you could integrate twice as many transistors in the same area.
So that technology was able to solve the problems that were...
solve...
technology, or with [inaudible] technology, on computer, on a chip.
So that technology then ended up in the hands of Intel.
And in 1970, I joined Intel, and there, I developed the first, I designed the first...
so the...
at that time there were two,
Or the right way, the right choice.
And with microprocessor, the old way that we designed systems change, because now
instead of designing a dedicated system, especially for control applications,
you couldn't use a computer, of course.
The computer was too expensive, was too bulky, cost too much, blah, blah, blah.
But, if but if you had a control problem, for example, you would largely go with
control problem and make a dedicated system.
But now with the microprocessor, you could use software instead of hardware.
So all of a sudden the way to use to design and use systems was completely changed.
It took a few years, of course.
But now you don't even think about developing a special hardware to do, to solve the problem.
You only solve problems with software.
The other things that happen is that because the, you could build a computer in a small
printed circuit board, an entire computer and of course with Silicon Gate technology, you
could look, we could do dynamic RAM, we could do non volatile memories that were a no with
the previous technologies, we could do CCDs.
So that technology allowed all the missing pieces to be done in a single chip.
And so by 1978, we had a computer on a chip, meaning not only the CPU, called
microprocessor, but also the memory, ROM, RAM, and IOT, programmable IOT.
So those were the microcontrollers that changed the way Then we do test
systems today, they, obviously, they ended up in pretty much any application.
This enormous change allow, for example, the cell phone.
The cell phone could not work if you didn't have a computer inside of it.
And so you had to have a computer in all applications, in small boxes, using
a little bit of power instead of a thousand watts or something like that.
And with this technology.
The future the applications that occur were enormous.
Also m Ss technology lend itself to be reducing size.
And so if if fuel, what is called the more Mors law, which is the doubling of the power
of a chip every couple of years or so which is being driving the technology to deploy that.
Today, advanced microprocessors had 50 billion transistors.
Against the 20 23 50, perhaps, if I remember correctly, 52, that the 4,004
that were drawn by hand by me had.
And so that's a big change.
And today, of course the impact of microprocessors.
On the on, on all aspects of our life, communications were revolutionized
with with with the microprocessor.
The the personal computer changed the way that we use computers because they became
personal as opposed to being shared devices.
And the same happened with with the phone.
It developed into the intelligent phones that we have today.
That are really literally changing our life.
So today we already had this, the threshold of a new change in technology, which is
the use of artificial intelligence, which requires specialized microprocessor that are
many hundreds of times faster though they're specialized, then the regular computers.
We are, we're nearing the end of wars law because we had reached three nano features.
Critical dimensions and three nanometers is essentially 30 atoms next to each other.
So we are we're down to almost atomic scale and therefore we have we, we
will have to use creativity and and new technologies which are coming.
But I stop here because there will be many questions later.
So I don't want to short the others.
Thanks a lot and I definitely have a lot of questions and we'll get back to you Federico.
WINT, please take it away.
So thanks so much, everyone, for joining us today, and thanks,
Federico, for setting the stage.
It's perfect, because those low cost and small processors made it possible for us to develop
communications technology, which is quite different from what the telephone system grew
up on, which is called circuit switching.
So in the late 60s, we started to explore an idea which had been around for a while, from
the early 60s, and that's packet switching.
Which makes the communications look like electronic postcards, but it only made sense if
the computers that you use to write the run the packet switching software were cost effective.
The early days of the ARPANET, which began in 1968 the first equipment showing up in 69.
were run with many computers that were taking advantage of what Federico was just describing.
We were able to start out with dedicated telephone circuits that connected those
special purpose processors together and which interfaced to the host computers that
had the actual applications running on them.
The host computers over time have morphed into gigantic data centers that use billions of the
kinds of chips that Federico was describing.
And the communication systems have advanced from dedicated telephone circuits to mobile
packet radio, which we had running in the Bay Area in the 1970s, 75, 76 timeframe.
Geosynchronous satellites like Intelsat IV A, which we were running in the 19 late
70s to support long distance communication.
Again, all of this is packet switch.
In 1973, Bob Metcalf at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center invents the Ethernet idea, which he
gets from a radio based system in Hawaii called AlohaNet, where collisions are resolved by
having a random delay and then you retransmit at random moments to avoid repeated collisions.
Ethernet, of course, is morphed into what is now known as Wi Fi and simultaneously.
With Marty Cooper's work, as you'll hear a bit more about.
We had 2G and 3G, 4G, now 5G and 6G is coming.
To say nothing of going from the geosynchronous satellites to MEO middle level satellites.
And now many of you may already be using low Earth orbiting satellites, as
you will find in the Starlink system.
That's run by SpaceX.
Over this period of time, several things have happened.
One of them is that...
The speeds and the scale of the system have gone up in this and often
a consequence of the scaling of the computers that Federico was describing.
The system has grown in the case of Internet when it was first started
in 1973 it had only Three networks.
It was the ARPANET, the packet radio net, mobile packet radio net, and the packet satellite net.
By 1983, when we turned it on, 400 computers on the system.
Today, there are billions of machines on the network, which spans the globe
and reaches beyond the Earth in the low Earth orbit and larger orbit satellites.
And we're not done yet because we're now going off planet.
There is already work that's been going on since 1998 to expand Internet's
operation across the solar system.
New protocols have been required which lets me mention briefly that the layered
architecture of the packet switched Internet allowed people to add new protocols at any new
layer, add a new layer as Tim Berners Lee did when he invented the World Wide Web in 1991.
Which was aggrandized by work at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications.
With the Mosaic Browser, which eventually morphed into Netscape Communications in
1994 and triggered the dot boom in 1995.
So here we are, it's 2023, computers are everywhere, communications is
everywhere, we're reliant on software that other people have written.
And it is the time of both.
Tremendous capability, to say nothing of artificial intelligence,
which is also surrounding us.
But it's also a time of great challenge, because a lot of these very powerful
technologies allow people to do harmful things in the online environment.
Trying to find ways of making the system safer and more secure while preserving all of the
benefits that we watched it, watched emerge over the past 50 years of Internet's work.
I'll stop there and hand off to I assume it's Marty is next.
Yes, please Marty.
Thank you very much.
It's a glorious day in Del Mar.
Erwin, have you looked outside?
The sun's shining for the first time in two weeks, and I think that's an omen that
is going to tell us a lot about what's happening in the next 50 years beyond
what we've been talking about up till now.
I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about the history.
I want to spend more time talking about what I think is going to happen in the future
with this confluence of three technologies.
That together have only started the revolution that's going to happen in the future.
I think we're just learning how to use connectivity the ability to access all the
information of mankind and to process that information in ways that make it useful for us.
I think we're just beginning.
But let me talk about the real beginning, and I have to go back more than 50 years.
Let me go back 130 years.
To the laboratory of Heinrich Hertz he is talking to this is at a
university town in Germany, and he has several of his colleagues together.
They're looking at this little wooden box with two little towers on it, and the towers
on the top of the towers are these silver balls, and He pulls the drapes, he turns the
gas light down, you must recognize that the light bulb hadn't been invented yet, and he
connects the voltaic pile to this wooden box.
Spark leaps between the two silver balls.
Across the room, there is a circle of copper wire, how the spark appears.
A small spark appears on this other wire.
He has now demonstrated that Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism really works.
The speed of light, these radio waves have gone across, I think they didn't have radio
then, but these waves have gone across the room and caused this spark to occur.
And Heinrich says, we have now demonstrated.
that Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism works.
He says, of course, it has no practical use, but it gives us something to
work on for the next few years.
A couple of years later barcoding, and I'm talking about our barcoding, and decides
that maybe there is a practical use, and he does the exact same experiment, except
in this case, he has a generator that puts out many kilowatts of electricity, and
the spark turns out to be a lightning rod.
Wow!
I have the antenna he used.
It was between telephone poles in Newfoundland, and if there were any birds sitting on those
wires on the telephone poles, they became immediate toast, because we were putting
kilowatts of energy, literally a lightning bolt, and sure enough, 3, 000 miles away
in the British Isles, we detect the blip of sound, and he has created the concept of radio.
Of course Marconi did this.
There is some dispute about whether Tesla did this at the same time.
Tesla was in the U.
S., Marconi was in Britain.
In Russia, a guy named Popov is celebrated as having invented the radio.
In India, it's a guy named Bose.
So we really don't know who invented radio.
It's not important, because this started a revolution.
Where Marconi started a company, within months they had saved a thousand people from dying at
the sinking of the Titanic, and the next thing you know, we have radio, we have television.
In 1947 Bell Labs announces that they, or, actually two Bell Labs researchers
write a paper about how we can ma multiply the capacity of the radio spectrum by
using a distribution of of radio signals.
In a pattern of circles.
They didn't know that the radio waves had not been educated yet to stay within these
circles, but somehow the system did end up.
Being workable, but they also decided that there was no practical use for this.
Now they put it into a filing cabinet, 22 yarders, and later AT& T.
Remember AT& T the Bell System, the monopoly that ran all our telephones?
They decided that the time was ready to do this, and they announced that they were gonna
come up with a new system of car telephones.
And they had to engage.
A consulting company and the consulting company told them, I forget whether it was
Ernst Young or Deloitte that the ultimate market for this new device, this car telephone
that the Bell System was gonna produce It was about a million telephones in the whole world,
that there would never be more than that.
And believe it or not, they were right, because there were, in the history of mobile
telephone, there were, the maximum number of car telephones that ever existed was the order
of a million in the whole world, because My colleagues and I at Motorola decided that the
world was ready for personal communications.
People didn't want to call a car, they didn't want to call a house, as they
had been doing for a hundred years.
They wanted to call a person, and we created the very first personal portable telephone.
An example which I have here, and Yasaman has already described it,
so I will go just further into that.
Today, there are 8 billion people in the world.
There are more than 8 billion cell phones.
By the way, I don't know why we call it a cell phone, but it had to be because
the cell system created this thing.
This device that we use today is not a phone, and it has nothing to do with cells,
because the cells didn't work anyway.
But there are more people, using cell phones today more than half the people
in the world are using cell phones.
I believe we have just barely learned how to use this device.
We're just on the cusp of several real revolutions.
And I just want to mention by name, I can't go into detail healthcare.
We now have sensors that we can put on a person's body that can
measure virtually everything.
Not only your pulse, your your blood pressure, your almost everything now.
We are learning every day how to put more sensors on.
These sensors can communicate with a central computer.
You can do a physical examination, not every year or every five years.
But every minute, and there is the potential of sensing a disease
before it really becomes a disease.
And if we can do that, we can zap these diseases and stop them.
There is the potential in the long range to eliminate the whole idea of disease.
We're not going to have disease.
The major use of this new device, the ability to access all the information in
the world, is to improve productivity, and we are doing that in space.
We are...
Countries in Africa, the United Nations determined that over a period
of 20 to 25 years that a billion people moved out of severe poverty.
They're still poor.
Their productivity brought on by the ability to connect.
Has virtually eliminated severe poverty in Africa, and when you extrapolate that
still further, there is a potential to totally eliminate productivity completely.
And the most important revolution I think that's going to happen When we put all
these things together, it's an education.
The idea of a teacher giving a lecture to a bunch of students, each of whom has
access to all the knowledge of the world, more than the teacher knows, is ludicrous.
The education system is going to change, it's going to take advantage of the
fact that students will have full time access to the Internet, not just when
they're in school, but everywhere.
And somehow or other, the education system is going to transform into a system
where people are learning all the time.
Our children, the students, are going to be a lot smarter than we are.
And the world that I see in the future is one where poverty it doesn't exist anymore, where
people are smart enough not to ever go to war.
That's my vision of the future, and I challenge you to challenge my vision.
Thank you very much.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks a lot, everyone.
I want to go back almost 50 years ago.
Maybe the day that Federico, you tested the first 4.
0.
4 and it worked.
The day that you developed the first TCP/IP protocol.
Then you submitted the paper, or Marty, the day that you developed the first
prototype, how much of this transformative technology were you predicting back then?
Were you predicting that this is the big deal that is gonna transform the way that being live?
And as the technology evolved, What surprised you the most about your own innovation?
Do you have an order that you want to do this in?
No, I think whoever wants to go first.
Marty just jumped in, so go ahead, Marty.
Oh,
I only jumped in because I couldn't quite hear what Yasaman was saying, so why don't
you start, but repeat Yasaman's challenge.
Okay, so basically she's saying when we did some of these early took these early steps, did
we have any idea what was coming as a result?
And what have we been surprised about?
My surprises in the internet world came in two forms.
The first one comes when I realize that this is a potentially commercial system
that might reach the general public.
Because the original work was done for the Defense Department in order
to design and build a command and control communication system for the U.
S.
military and for its allies.
And that's what the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency charged Bob Kahn and me to do.
And to integrate a number of different kinds of radio based and wire based
communication technologies into a common and broad global spanning Internet.
But the fact that it might be of commercial interest doesn't really strike
me until 1988 when I walked into the Moscone Center in San Francisco and saw
25,000 people looking at internet based equipment, software, and applications, and
realizing that there must, somebody thinks they're going to make money out of this.
So then I was thinking how do we build an, essentially, a, an economic engine
to, to sustain its use and growth?
So that was the first surprise, was realizing that it might be commercializable.
At that point, there was hardware and software that was being sold, but the service
wasn't available until the following year, 1989, when three commercial services popped
up in the US, UUNet, PSINet, and SURFnet.
The next big surprise comes...
When Tim Berners Lee announces the World Wide Web in December of 91.
And at that point, nobody noticed, except for the guys at the National Center for
Supercomputer Applications, and they said, Oh, this is a nice text based search engine
or, but, browser, but what if we made it a graphical interface, a graphical user interface?
So they invent the Mosaic browser, and suddenly the Internet looks like a magazine.
Everybody downloads Mosaic.
Browser, and suddenly the World Wide Web becomes very visible.
to a great many people, but it wasn't it wasn't until the, that technology was commercialized at
Netscape Communications that we started seeing people, for the sheer joy of sharing what they
knew, creating web pages, many of them manually writing their own HTML code, until finally
applications were developed to make it much easier to design, build, and deploy a web page.
So the early and mid 1990s were a big surprise for me.
So much information flowed into what we call the World Wide Web that nobody could find anything,
which drove the need for search engines.
Some of which many of you will remember, AltaVista, Yahoo,
Google in 1998, and Bing later.
All of which we use, many of us, every single day, many times a day.
And then the next thing hits, and that's 2007 when the smartphone
arrives in the form of the iPhone.
And up until that point, Marty's work and the work of the Internet had
proceeded more or less in parallel.
But by creating a device that had a computer, multiple radios, a touch sensitive screen,
a camera, a speaker, and a microphone, the invention collapsed an enormous number of
functionalities into a handheld device.
And suddenly, the mobile smartphone becomes the way you get to the Internet.
And the Internet is the Internet gives the smartphone access to
literally millions of applications and all the content on the Internet.
This is a hypergolic mutually reinforcing environment.
So those were the things that really surprised me, and of course I'm expecting
to be surprised again, assuming Marty's vision of the future materializes.
Federico, you go first and I'll finish it.
All right.
To me the surprise was the, how fast microprocessors were adopted.
When I did this work, the first applications that we could see were of course calculating
machines because those were obvious.
And it was, the first microprocessor was designed explicitly for a customer that
was making a family of calculators with it.
But I saw that control applications were the next batch because in those days,
to control anything would be costly if you have to design a special system, a
dedicated system, and only, you can only sell, 100 or 1, 000 of those systems.
So the cost of developing the hardware would be prohibited.
And that was the first application that Intel went after.
After I showed that, that family could really be effective for Control application.
So that was the beginning.
At that time, also, the technology had begun, the Moore's Law had begun to be
understood, especially in terms of what do we need to do to drive the car, so to speak.
And and by reducing the size of transistors in a sort of a, almost a predictable way...
We were able for the next 40 years to double the number of transistors in and in, in,
and double the speed almost regularly to the point where, we had transistors that you could
have a microprocessor that would run 2, 3, 4 gigahertz, which, if you had asked me, I
thought it were, it was not possible because at that time, the eyes of the transistor
would have to be so small that I didn't think we could have been able to do it.
But in fact using, using a special lithography equipment that was blew
my mind really when I saw them.
We could go down to a micron and keep on going.
To the point where today we have chips that have one trillion transistors.
Those are the the flash memory technology chips that we use routinely
without even pay attention to.
But those chips are made by making of the order of a hundred layers of
transistors, one on top of each other.
So it's an unbelievable technology.
But we tend not to pay attention to that because we simply use the technology.
But the again, would I have imagined that we could do that in 50 years ago?
Absolutely not.
To me to me, the personal computer that became a, also an instant success in some ways.
And created the background where millions of people could have, access to a computer
were foundational because that allow, that allowed them to do all these services,
allow internet to become a real, a real market as opposed to a curiosity.
So it was the the baseline of personal computers that allow them.
Internet to be, to become very effective and it became a virtual cycle, more,
more computers, more better, better chips, more computer more applications.
And to me, the Internet, And not as a technology, because that was very clear
that, that it could be done and all that.
But as the new applications that nobody had thought about, search engines,
being able to bet on, betting games.
You name it or or I forgot now the name of the company.
Because they come and go.
But but basically applications that I would've never imagined were really
happening every month, something new.
So for me this technology has had many surprises.
And finally in in the artificial intelligence back in in 1986, A company,
Synaptics, where we wanted, I wanted to make chips that learn by themselves.
So using floating gate transistors and being able to use neural networks.
I was able to show that worked, but the amount of computation necessary
was just not there in those days.
But that technology was a technology that now we find applied everywhere.
with the, with chips that make trillions of multiplications per second.
And in that technology.
Also came out of the same basic movement that we have seen.
And as I look ahead, I see applications that go way beyond what the technology that we
have, that the technology that we have will allow to develop the technology of the future.
For example, the fact that we have transistors that switch.
Using power that is much, much more than the brain uses.
It uses about 1 billion less watts per switching.
And so that, that is an incredible, it's a proof of principle that we need to learn from.
Today, the chips for AI, some chips dissipate 400 watts.
So that's crazy.
How can you use chips of that, for 400 watts?
We are back to where we started with computers that, that dissipated kilowatts but but life is
showing us biology, showing us ways of doing it.
The one, two computers to actually do a simulation and learn our life
really, and that we may return to that.
Wonderful.
Thanks a lot.
There you go, Marty.
First of all, I appreciate the being the last speaker and this, that question
because then I could explain whatever all the previous speakers meant to say.
But we knew back in 1973 that The cell phone was going to be a popular device.
The story we told was that someday when you were born, you would be assigned a phone number.
If you didn't answer the phone, you had died.
We had no idea that you could put a digital camera.
Inside a cell phone, because a digital camera had been invented, and the Internet
had been invented before, and the processor did not exist, so how could you do
all this stuff that we're doing today?
So all of those things are a big surprise, but the big surprises are yet to come.
I think that the cell phone today is...
Terribly suboptimal.
Just think about it, if we you want to talk to somebody, you hold the phone up
to your ear in this awkward position you have what we call apps, applications.
There are four million applications.
Available to you.
Now, how do you pick the one that you're going to use?
At at least, the cell phone of the future is going to be very different
from the one we have today, and we're going to have all kinds of surprises.
Certainly there will be an artificial intelligence.
The cell phone is going to be an extension of your personality, and not some guy at Apple or
Samsung who decides what your The cell phone is going to be this artificial intelligence
that will analyze your behavior and find the right apps to make your life better, or
perhaps it will create the apps by itself.
But the whole principle of the future of cellular telephony is improving.
Humanity, improving the human experience.
We are doing a lot of very interesting things in the Internet of Things.
I don't object to working on the Internet of Things.
But we haven't yet finished the Internet of People, and I hope
that we work very hard at that.
And Adam, if you're listening to me, I know you are.
I hope you take that personally.
But I think we had a some wonderful experience to be had in the future of cellular telephony.
Great.
Thanks.
I see a lot of questions in the chat.
Please keep them coming.
I see a question by Dennis.
I want to rephrase it with Dennis permission a little bit.
Oh, Vint, your hand is...
Yes I wanted to respond to to Marty for just a second because the power of the
Internet is indeed the people who use it.
The same argument can be made for the mobile phone and all the computers that
people like Federico have developed.
The problem that we have, of course, is that not everybody has everyone
else's best interests at heart.
And so we're seeing these powerful tools.
being used in a variety of ways, some of which are, in fact, quite harmful.
There's, of course, this huge conversation going on right now about artificial
intelligence and machine learning and various applications that arise from it,
and the potential hazards that the use of these large language models might pose.
And so the real problem we have right now, in addition to any technological
challenges, is figuring out how to hold accountable bad behavior.
How to do that on a, on an international scale while at the same time preserving
all of the value that we have seen already realized with the systems that we have
today as primitive as they might seem to be looking from the 50 years in the future.
So we need sociologists and psychologists and anthropologists and people who
are concerned about legal structures.
We need people who deal with people.
And understand, how it is that we...
Accept certain behavioral norms in exchange for certain benefits.
That's the social contract that Rousseau talked about many years ago.
So the challenges here are not only with the technologists, they're also with people
who help shape the way societies work.
We need to help as technologists to reinforce tools that will allow those solutions to
be implemented, but we are not the sole parties that can solve all the problems.
We have a much broader agenda.
And a much broader need for smart sociological steps that need to be taken.
And at the UN and the International Telecommunications Union and elsewhere,
we're seeing all of these debates going on, which are aimed at trying
to cope with some of those challenges.
Great.
Thanks man.
So the question coming from Dennis is what are the biggest technology and societal challenges?
I guess wind already alluded to it so I wanna make it more specific.
For example, for Federico, you mentioned the Moores lines ending, right?
So what is gonna be.
Coming after that, what is next?
Are we prepared for it?
What is going to be the challenges we're going to have to solve in the
chip technology in the next 10 years?
Vint, you mentioned dealing with the bad players and ensuring that The
security of the Internet is preserved.
What are your thoughts on digital divide and making sure the
Internet is accessible to everyone?
And then for Marty, I know you work a lot on a spectrum management and
cellular system as well, right?
And as we have more and more of these devices, billion of IoT devices and cell
phones, we know that the spectrum blows up.
Below six gigahertz is getting more and more crowded, right?
And of course, we're not optimizing the spectrum as, as much as we can, right?
Do you think by optimizing the spectrum and do a better job in a spectrum management,
the problem is gonna be solved, or do we need to explore higher bands, millimeter
weighted, mid band, even sub parahedral?
So these are three specific questions, but the underlying theme is what are the
main challenges to be solved in the next 10 years in each of the innovations.
Federico, if you want to take the first shot.
All right.
The, obviously there is not much room left with the current technology in
reducing the size of transistors.
Because we, we think that it would be almost impossible to get to one nanometer, that's
10 atoms, because if you, when you say 10 atoms, that's a line, wide 10 atoms, but,
plus or minus one atom it's it's crazy.
So we are already at three.
And so we need to become smarter in the way we use the technology.
We need to be more creative.
In the past we had brute force the entire system, the entire process by, If we can
quickly reduce the size by a factor of two, then we have four times the, the power.
And that strategy no longer works, so we have to become clever.
But there is going to be an end to that game and the appetite for computational
power, especially for power, to use low power, is enormous because, as I mentioned
earlier, many of the applications that we are talking about today You know, gobble up
gazillions, of multiplications per second.
And so where do we go?
Now there is the promise of one end of quantum computation where you have
entangled quantum bits as opposed to...
Classical bits that are the the exploited, the computation, which a allows you to do parallel,
parallel computation, which can be, ordered.
Many orders are made to faster than what we can do with classical computers.
But quantum computers have two problems.
One is that they have to work at near absolute zero temperature minus 273.
Centigrade.
So that's a tough thing to do.
And of course they, you can not have one of those in your pocket.
And so they can be a service through, the, through the web through some
cloud computing service for people that want to use this type of computers.
And the other problem is that they are not general purpose.
They, there are only, a handful of algorithms now that can use
the power of quantum computation.
And so there is a lot of work to do, but I think work fundamental because it's going
to teach what is quantum physics say.
Nobody understands quantum physics today and nobody understands why
quantum objects are entangled.
Scientists have been fighting over this for, 80 years.
And finally they have to to concede that there is this non local property of
reality, which is called entanglement.
No time to display what it is.
But the point is that we have something here.
Which is so revolutionary and something that actually explains why life is
actually not a classical phenomenon.
It's a one, two and classical phenomenon.
And this is an area where I've been working for many years and is an area
that promise to explain who we are.
Who are we?
Are we machines driven by the principle of the survival of the fittest,
if that is what we believe we are.
We are in deep trouble because the survival of the fittest means war and the fact that
we are machines means there is no hope.
When the machine breaks, we do not exist anymore.
So the problem of consciousness, the problem of free will, The fundamental problems that
are at the basis, of the inequality that we see in the world, because that inequality
is not a technological problem, it's a human problem, it's a problem of the heart.
That is the problem that needs to be solved, and that goes beyond
technology, and that requires our heart.
Wow,
That was a strong message.
Thanks a lot, Verico.
Marty, do you want to go next?
Sure.
That was a wonderful comment, Federico.
I don't know how we define the heart of technology, but I think
we're going to work it out.
But there is a myth that Spectrum is like beachfront property.
You use it up, and there isn't any more.
And yet...
The capacity of the spectrum from the time Marconi did his first transmissions,
when he transmitted from Newfoundland to the British Isles, there could only be
in the entire world, maybe four or five Simultaneous conversations, otherwise they
would have interfered with each other.
I did an analysis of where we are today.
It turns out over the first 50 years, we increased the capacity of the
radio spectrum by a million times.
In the next 50 years, we increased it another million times.
We are a trillion times more efficient.
today in using the radio spectrum than we were in Mark Hody's time, and yet we still
have not just barely tapped the techniques for using the spectrum effectively.
In fact, we're doing everything possible.
to make it harder to increase the capacity of the spectrum.
And we let the the in the U.
S., we let the Congress decide how to allocate the spectrum.
I can't think of any group less competent to understand radio spectrum than the U.
S.
Congress.
The whole idea of giving somebody...
Exclusive access to a piece of spectrum doesn't make any sense at all, because
sharing the spectrum is the way to make one of the most important way of
getting more capacity in the spectrum.
And yet today.
Every element of the spectrum is owned exclusively by somebody.
That's just not a practical thing, but there is no doubt in my mind that we can increase
the capacity of the radio spectrum over the next 50 years by another million times.
And that's a good thing because we are thinking of new ways Of using the collaboration of people
to solve all of the big problems in the world.
And I hope, Federico, that we technologists can figure out how.
To understand the UNR end of the process, and the very concept of war.
What do you think?
Well, Yasaman if I could just interject quickly here, we do have a number of questions
that have been entered through the Q& A, and There's one in particular that I'm looking
at that I think is a nice follow up to what Vint and Marty and Federico were just saying.
The question is, does the panel think the R& D, the U.
S.
R& D complex is doing what is needed to keep these great innovations coming?
What could we be doing better?
DARPA, ARPA, academia, corporate research different today than 50 years ago.
Are there countries, other countries or regions that look to be doing R& D better that might
be models for us going, for the next big thing?
If you'd like to put that to the panel, and I see Vint raising his hand to respond.
I'll be happy to start an answer anyway.
First of all there are other countries that are advancing in their state of the art
of research, China being an obvious one.
I believe in the long run, though, that science is widely shareable, and that's our
whole theory, is that shared knowledge is what advances our ability in the long run,
and so we should take advantage of that.
Internet is one tool for sharing that information, and I'm excited to
see more and more of that happening.
I do think that by the way the phrase survival of the fittest which Federico
said meant more, I'd like to suggest a more optimistic interpretation of what that means.
It's more like...
Most adaptable, because if you look at the theory of evolution, it's the
adaptation that drives evolution.
And so what we need as a society is to learn how to adapt to a more positive environment,
to, pay attention to our problems like global warming, pay attention to smarter use of
spectrum, like Marty was saying, sharing.
You learn to do sharing when you're in kindergarten.
We should remember those lessons and apply them.
To to our everyday lives and the challenges that lie ahead.
I know we're going to run out of time soon, so I'll stop.
Maybe others would like to respond to that question as well.
I'll respond to this, Vint, because the principle of the survival of the
fittest used to be the principle.
I would go the strongest that to me, to call it the fittest is the politically
correct version of that symbol.
The fact of the matter is we think that we are machines.
Science is telling us today that we are machines.
And if we are machines, then...
Because a machine that we build collectively called AI could potentially be better than us.
Because they are also machines.
Do, are we really machines or are we not?
That question has been motivating me the last 35 years.
of my life to research the nature of consciousness and the nature of free will.
And I am actually happy to say that in the last two years, we have, together with the
top physicist in Italy, which is a, one of the top ten in the quantum information we
have come to a theory that actually shows that consciousness is a quantum phenomenon.
And as such, and exists in a reality which is vaster, the reality where you have space
and time and the matter that we know, that we think is the only thing that exists.
So if you start there, all of a sudden then living systems are quantum and classical
systems that connect the consciousness, which is not part of the living system,
is actually existing in a reality vaster.
Then living systems then connect to the.
Reality of classical information, the matter, the macroscopic matter that we think is
the reality described by classical physics.
So now we have a different view of who we are.
And in that view, the death of the body is not the death at all.
And if we start from here, we can actually go way beyond what we have been able to do
because In the past, we have been considering ourselves completely isolated from the others.
That's why if I kill somebody, no problem to me.
Basically that person is separate from me.
But actually in the quantum world is holistic.
There are no separable parts.
We are all part of a whole, as opposed to be a reductionistic world.
So just changing the sense of who we are can change the way we act in the world.
Because now if I...
Bobby, I end up hurting myself because we are all connected.
And if I do some good to others, then I do good to myself.
So it is this philosophical starting point that has to change because if we don't start
from there with the root is not saying, and the root is not saying, wars will continue.
Wow.
I don't know how I'm going to follow that, Federico, because my comments are much more
trivial than what you're talking about, but I subscribe to everything that you said.
But one of the big problems we have in the short term future is that we are
regulated and politicized by people who do not understand technology.
We have a patent system.
That broke a long time ago and it was supposed to protect the individual inventor.
And at the moment, it only protects the biggest companies who don't need protection.
Somehow or other, we have to figure out how to revise our political system to
understand the kinds of things that you are talking about, Federico, and what Ben talks
about, so that we can get out of the way.
Perhaps the technologists put a minimum of guardrails in our people talking about
we ought to pause artificial intelligence.
Good luck.
The genie's out of the bottle, even if you're not going to put him back in again.
We somehow or other have to get some intelligence into our political system,
and I think that's a major challenge.
I want to add one more to that, to Marty, and answer various questions in a different way.
I guess the problem in academia at least, is that the incentives are
for you to solve similar problems.
So that you can publish more and you have fast turnaround in your projects.
It's, yes, there are fundings available if you want to do a transformative technology that
will take decades, but do we have enough of it?
I don't think so.
And I think that's a problem, definitely, that's going to impact the innovation
and innovation culture 50 years from now.
So it's it's Vint again.
Just responding to that one of the things that I've enjoyed in the course of my
career is something called a skunkworks.
And what that really is an isolated team, which is shielded from
whatever business issues are arising.
In order to go and focus on a particular problem and to just stay on that problem.
Internet was built in a sense in the Skunk Works.
When I was working on MCI Mail, we were isolated from the rest of the company, and
they basically said, go make this happen.
I'm a big fan of skunkworks kinds of things, which let people focus on on problems and not be
sidetracked by for example, near term concerns.
Now, that sometimes isn't possible.
You have to have sources of funding and support and facilities and everything
else in order to make a skunkworks.
Function successfully.
There's a very famous skunkworks that was run by Lockheed Martin, for example, that
made some of the most advanced aircraft used in intelligence gathering, and it
succeeded in part precisely because it was given the resources it needed, and it was
told, don't get distracted by anything else, just go figure out how to make this work.
Maybe we need a kind of sociological skunkworks in order to figure out how
to make these technologies work for us.
Instead of having it go the other way around.
Yes, we have just a few minutes left now and actually there's this,
I have, yeah, I have one final question that I really wanna ask
We have a lot
I was just gonna suggest, time for the final question.
Interior sciences engineers in the room.
What is your advice, what is your message for the next generation of inventors?
I have a simple one.
If you want to do something big, get help, especially from people
who are smarter than you are.
Amen.
Wonderful.
Great.
I'll, I enjoyed the discussion a lot.
I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as I did.
I think we need t shirts saying on it, Spectral is beachfront property.
And the other one, maybe we are all connected.
Both through quantum and through wireless communication, something like that.
So thanks a lot, everyone, for participating.
I know Barry has a few final thoughts for us to share with us,
so I'll hand it over to you, Barry.
Thank you, Yasaman.
I just wanted to...
again, as Dennis said at the outset this was originally to be a members only event, but
we decided to, to share it more broadly and I know there are maybe many people in the
audience who have been participating and say gaining some insight into what are some of
the benefits of becoming a Marconi Society member by being a member of the Society, yes,
you get access to events like the ones that we just had, that we all just participated in.
And emerging from these kinds of events, now we're getting opportunities with the kind of
people that you had speaking with us today.
We do have a regular magazine, the Marconi Signal, and also a monthly newsletter.
And one other announcement I'd like to make we do have our annual Marconi Society Awards Gala.
Coming up on Friday, October 27th at the Smithsonian National Museum
of Natural History in Washington, D.
C.
I'll say that seats at the gala are limited but if you are interested in attending
please go to the Marconi Society website and you can get additional information
on how to attend the event there.
Thank you everyone for attending.
And you can see the link at the bottom of the page there.
And I believe that the link is also on out in the chat if you'd like to find
out more about becoming a member of the Marconi Society and participating in the
various events and getting access to all the benefits of that comes with membership.
Thank you everybody and look forward to being in contact with you
all again.